


As Whole as We Could Be

by tacewrites



Category: Leverage
Genre: Episode: s05e09 The Rundown Job, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, OT3, Pining, and feelings are being felt, and repressed the hell out of, guess who's doing the repressing, it's post-rundown job, no beta we die like nate's dad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29768322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tacewrites/pseuds/tacewrites
Summary: Alec has no idea how he got here.Parker has some idea.Eliot knows exactly.
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 12
Kudos: 65





	As Whole as We Could Be

**Author's Note:**

> So Leverage, and more specifically The Rundown Job, recently happened to me and it left me on the floor, so I had to process some ot3 feelings through...whatever this is. The majority of it takes place directly after the events of The Rundown Job, and also operates around the idea that the episode takes place after Nate and Sophie leave instead of where it actually is in the show, for no reason other than I like it that way. Also, because it's post-rundown, there is some talk of blood and wound care. It's not overly detailed, but just a heads up anyway.

Alec has no idea how he got here.

Not specifically _here_ here. It’s definitely simple to figure out how he got to be lounging on the couch watching the director’s cut of Alien 3 (the real one, of course, which he’d obtained “totally legally”) for the fourth time. That’s just how it is when you’re a living the geek life and you happen to be exceptionally good at hacking and ferreting out secrets. Ain’t no thing and not the part he’s hung up on.

Voices filter down the hall and into the common area of the team’s base of operations, and he uses the remote to turn the volume on the TV a little lower and turns toward the glass windows to see Parker and Eliot as they walk through the hallway. Well, Parker is walking. Eliot isn’t so much walking as he is stalking down the hall, grumbling about Lord only knows what. Alec grins, sure that this will be just as, if not more, entertaining than his movie.

“I did say I was sorry,” Parker says matter of factly before turning to Alec and giving him a little wave when he blows a kiss in her direction. 

“Well, that doesn’t do much in the way of fixin’ anything, Parker, now does it?” Eliot replies, and tugs the beanie that he’s wearing a little lower on his head before emptying his pockets of his keys and wallet and tossing them on the table in a huff.

Parker crosses her arms. “I actually don’t think this is my fault, though.”

“Oh?” Eliot scoffs. “How do you figure?”

“You asked me to cut it.”

“I said like an inch!”

She shrugs. “How am I supposed to know what an inch looks like by eyeballing it?”

“Don’t look like this,” Eliot argues as he whips the beanie off his head.

With the beanie gone, Alec catches up to the point of the argument. The movie becomes background noise as it’s forgotten entirely. Where once Eliot’s hair cascaded in waves down past his shoulders, it’s now much shorter, barely reaching his neck in the back. His bangs, though currently sticking straight up, don’t look long enough to even reach his eyes. Way different from how it was when he’d seen him only a few hours ago.

“I didn’t do all of that,” Parker counters as she reaches out to fix Eliot’s bangs.

He bats her hand away. “I’m aware. Had to get a professional to fix your mess.”

“Well, it doesn’t look bad. Does it, Hardison?”

Eliot turns a challenging gaze in his direction, as if daring him to say something quippy. But Alec doesn’t have any quips at the ready, and can’t seem to conjure one up even if he wanted to. And he really doesn’t want to, because while it definitely is different, it for sure doesn’t look bad. At all. Eliot actually looks pretty hot, and if Alec valued his life any less, he’d probably tell him so.

“Looks spiffy, man,” he offers instead.

“See?” Parker says before Eliot can say anything, and seizes the opportunity to make another pass at his bangs while he’s distracted with making a face at Alec.

This time, she succeeds, sweeping his bangs down and to the side before he can stop her. Awkward though it looks coming from Parker, it does the trick, blending the bangs in with the rest of his hair, but she doesn’t stop there. Instead, she cards her hand through again, stroking down ever so gently, and then repeats the motion when the ends slide through her fingers. Eliot’s eyes narrow before he turns away from Alec back to her.

“Were you plannin’ on keepin’ that hand?”

“I’m kind of attached to it, yeah,” she replies. She smiles at her own little joke before switching directions and pushing his bangs back with a hum. “Spiffy.”

He stands there and takes it, despite releasing a heavy sigh that sounds put upon, but the way his eyes slip closed for the briefest of moments gives Alec the impression that that isn’t remotely the case. His own fingers flex into the couch cushion. When Eliot opens his eyes, he immediately bats her hand away and takes a step back, gaze flitting over to Alec. It’s a habit of his lately, ever since Alec and Parker started dating, for him to gauge Alec’s reaction to things that have to do with Parker and himself. He thinks he’s being subtle, trying to make sure he hasn’t overstepped or made Alec upset or jealous. But Alec has noticed, and thinks it’s completely unnecessary. Eliot has nothing to worry about; he’s never been jealous. Not of Eliot, at least. If he’d so much as thought of doing what Parker did, he’d lose a hand for sure.

Alec has no idea how he got _here_ , at the point where he has feelings for both the thief and the hitter on his team.

It started with Parker. He knew he was into her fairly quickly into the permanent formation of the Leverage team, even while hardly understanding her. Lucky for him, she made it clear she wasn’t _not_ interested, but it was also clear that if they were ever gonna happen, it would be on her timetable. That was fine; his Nana raised him right, and one of the many things she taught him was that only the best things in life require patience, and Parker holds a spot at the very top of that list. So patient he was, and that was really all it took to eventually hack the puzzle that was Parker and a place in her heart. Worth it.

In the meantime, there was Eliot. Eliot, their hitter with more lethality in his pinky finger than Alec himself has in his whole body, who grumbles and growls his way through most conversations and balks at most attempts at comradery he doesn’t initiate himself. Protective and loyal seemingly to a fault, to the point that he’d risked his life for people he hardly knew and didn’t want to be involved with at the start of it all. _Also,_ also, he’s hot as hell, and Alec is only human, so he’s not immune to a hot guy who risks it all to protect the people he cares about. And for all that he gripes, Eliot does care, that much is for damn certain. It took a while for Alec to notice, in the midst of pursuing Parker, that whatever he felt for Eliot was more than just an attraction to the guy, but he did eventually notice. Not that it mattered; by that time, Parker had confessed her feelings for “pretzels” and he was so, so on board that he sort of forgot about it entirely.

Well…almost entirely.

“Spiffy,” Alec repeats now, for the purpose of assuring Eliot he’s done nothing wrong, and then wags his eyebrows at him for good measure.

It has the intended effect; the shame on Eliot’s face morphs into something more like irritation as he looks away to shrug his jacket off. “You have a word of the day calendar or somethin’?” he grumbles. He runs a hand through his hair as he glances at the clock on the wall. “Wastin’ daylight,” he continues as he starts going off back the way he and Parker came, “too much to do to be spending it on somethin’ stupid…”

“Where you gotta be?” Alec asks.

Eliot stops in his tracks. “Downstairs to the brewpub, because somebody has to make sure that the menu has actual food people can eat, and that every dish doesn’t come with a side of macaroni and cheese with bacon bits on top!”

He cocks his head. “What’s wrong with bacon bits?”

“What’s wrong with bac—dammit Hardison, have some class!”

And with that, he stomps down the hall and out the door. Alec chuckles to himself, pleased at getting a rise out of him, and ignores the distinct “lack of Eliot” feeling that now permeates the room. The voices from the TV now filter back into his consciousness as more than just background noise, and he turns to find that he’s missed two whole scenes since he’d last tuned in. Oh well, at least he’s seen it before.

Suddenly, Parker is there next to him, hanging upside down off the back of the couch, hair splayed against the cushion beside him. He looks down at her and smiles, feeling instantly warmed by her presence and not at all startled despite not hearing her move. He’s used to it by now.

“Your day been better than his?” he asks.

“I guess,” she replies. “I’m sort of responsible for his day being bad, though.”

“Nah, don’t sweat it, mama. If anything, I think you did him a favor.”

She considers that a moment. “Okay,” she finally says.

He gives her another reassuring smile before focusing on the movie again. Onscreen, Ripley’s being bad ass as usual and no one is paying her any mind. A mistake, really. You don’t doubt Ripley. After a few minutes, Parker speaks again.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says.

Alec reaches for the remote and pushes pause. She sounds serious, and when Parker speaks, he listens. “What’s up, baby?”

She kicks her legs over the back of the couch and sits up in one swift motion, making the move look way easier and more graceful than it actually would be for anyone else. Her hands go to her lap as she turns to sit cross legged facing him, expression all business.

“Should we steal Eliot?”

~

Parker has some idea of how she got here.

The path is a little twisty, but it makes sense, when you really think about it hard enough. The desire to steal something is the easiest part of the equation here; she’s pretty much always had that, therefore, it’s the easiest part to understand. Maybe she hasn’t ever wanted to steal a whole person (not for herself at least; she’s done it plenty of times for a job by now), but if you follow the strings back to where they all converged and get tangled up, then you could probably pick them apart and…alright, metaphors make this way more complicated than it has to be, and she isn’t good at them anyway.

Simply put, it probably started with a job.

That first job, in which she didn’t know anyone but was expected to trust everyone, and though it very nearly got her killed, she did survive it. And somehow found herself sticking around after. Thieving had always been done for herself, but she suddenly found that thieving for Leverage, for this team, was something that had a purpose. Bad guys being good guys was fun, and also brought with it a sense of comfort she wasn’t used to but found that she liked. There were opportunities to leave it all behind, but taking them never stuck. Somehow it had been way too easy to like and trust a group of seemingly untrustworthy people, and she missed her friends when they were no longer by her side.

And then, of course, there was Hardison.

Hardison might actually be the trickiest part to process about this whole situation. He is, or was, the part where the path got twisty and the strings got tangled. Parker had no plan B for “boyfriend” and therefore had no plan H for “Hardison” when he made it fairly clear that he thought about her in ways other than a crewmate. But she did like him and thought he was cute, even though she didn’t understand half of what he ever said, and he was also fun to kiss when she could do it under the pretense of doing it for a job where it was safe and excusable. He was also sweet, and funny, and gentle, and at some point, she realized that it was easier to trust him with the feelings she carried for him than to keep them to herself. 

There’s a beat of silence in which he processes what she said. Then his mouth opens like he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out, so he swallows nervously before trying again.

“H-how do you mean?” he manages.

“You know what I mean,” she tells him.

He nods, because he does know exactly what she means. It’s not like this is the first time they’ve had this conversation, it’s just the first time either of them has been direct about it. Up until now, they’ve only tiptoed around the subject, but that hasn’t gotten them anywhere. They’ve never gotten anything they were after by waiting around wishing they had it.

Stealing Eliot is the logical conclusion, she thinks. Romantic relationships have never been something she thought much about, and she spent most of whatever romantic energy she possessed over the past few years figuring out her relationship with Hardison. Her relationship with Eliot, on the other hand, was much simpler. Prickly though he is, Eliot has always been ready to go to bat for her at a moment’s notice, and they seem to get each other on a level no one else would understand. It’s a certain kind of intimacy, and one that she has always been comfortable with when it came to him.

And if that was all it was, Parker wouldn’t be considering this at all. She may be inexperienced, but she’s not naïve enough to think she needs to be in a relationship with Eliot just because they share an understanding. There’s more to it, like the fact that she also finds him attractive. He’s not the same kind of cute as Hardison, but that apparently doesn’t matter, because she could spend hours watching Eliot do what he does and not get tired of it. He’s mesmerizing. And beautiful. And sometimes when he tosses his hair, her heart beats faster.

She spent so long opening up to the idea of having one boyfriend, she figures that having two isn’t a problem. Eliot is an irreplaceable part of the crew, of their family, and they would not be whole without him. In much the same way, she and Hardison, happy though they are, aren’t whole by themselves. Not as whole as they could be, at least. There’s room for one more.

“Does Eliot…want to be stolen?” Hardison asks her.

It seems to be the only reservation he has. She guesses it’s fair, and probably the most important thing to worry about. If Eliot doesn’t want to be with them in the same way they want to be with him, they might wreck everything they do have by aiming for something else.

She furrows her brows, frowning slightly. “I don’t know.”

Alec reaches out and touches the back of her hand, his eyes lighting up when she flips it over to hold onto his. He smiles at her then, and she feels herself smiling back.

“We can figure that part out,” he assures her.

Right. There’s always a little work to do before the actual job. “Recon?”

He chuckles. “Recon.”

It wouldn’t be like a normal mission. There would be no disguises or stealthy escape plans. The only thing they could do was wait and watch, hoping for something that would answer their question.

The answer does come late one night, as she, Hardison, and Eliot watch Nate and Sophie walk away from them for what seems to be the last and final time. And while it hurts, there is hope in the sorrow because, while the three of them quietly stand around processing, Parker’s brain is very unquiet with words that keep repeating over and over.

_Till my dying day._

_I don’t have to search anymore._

It seems like answer enough. It’s at least something.

“So,” she says at the same time as Hardison says “Um,” and Eliot says “I gotta—”.

They all go silent again. Hardison clears his throat.

“You, uh,” he starts, gesturing to Eliot, “you go first.”

Eliot looks everywhere but at either of them, as if he’s clearing the room. But they all know it’s as secure as it could possibly be. “I was just sayin’ that I gotta be headin’ out.”

“Oh, already?” Hardison asks. “We can chill here a bit.”

“Got stuff to do.”

Quick as a flash, Parker takes a tiny step forward, gives Eliot a peck on the cheek, and steps back again, all before he can react. She can remember a time when Hardison did that to her, a tiny declaration hidden inside an act of gratefulness, and hopes that Eliot only reads into it as much as he wants to.

“See you tomorrow?” she asks.

How Eliot takes it is a mystery. Save for a quick glance in Hardison’s direction, he doesn’t react at all. “Yeah, tomorrow” he mumbles.

He makes his escape fairly quickly. When it’s just her and Hardison, she smiles up at him conspiratorially. 

“So, we’re stealing Eliot?”

“Pick the play, baby,” he replies with a grin, “pick the play.”

~

Eliot knows exactly how he got here.

The part where he’s currently bleeding through the bandages he’s got wrapped around his shoulder and leg is obviously a no brainer. Basically par for the course. He might as well check “get shot” off of his daily to do list for how very normal it is. Not that it doesn’t hurt like hell, but hey, at least he’s conscious.

“Think I still got a bullet in my leg,” he informs the van.

Parker shifts forward as the van jerks a little when Hardison looks back at the both of them from the driver’s seat.

“Man, why am I not going to the hospital right now?” he asks, voice all high and clearly panicking.

“Cuz I don’t like ‘em, Hardison, now just drive,” he orders, gritting his teeth as he moves to dig his phone out of his back pocket. “Parker,” he continues, “look through my contacts and find Paul DC. Text him our hotel address and room number.”

She takes it and starts scrolling. “And Paul is some back alley doctor?” she asks without looking up.

“He doesn’t have a license anymore if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh, sounds nice,” Hardison calls back, voice laced with sarcasm, “loving this idea.”

“Hardison, when your ass gets shot, you’re welcome to get it fixed up by whatever licensed professional your heart desires,” he retorts as he closes his eyes and leans his head against the van wall.

Not that Hardison would ever have to worry about that. Any bullet aiming for Hardison would have to go through him first.

“Why do you have contacts in DC?” Parker interjects while Hardison mutters something about the merits of people with licenses to practice medicine.

He opens his eyes to give her a serious look. “You need me to answer that question?”

“Not really,” she replies as she hands him back the phone.

The three of them fall silent again. Hardison drives, Eliot tries not to bleed out, and Parker keeps a careful eye on them both until the van comes to a stop. Eliot tries to stand, but finds he can’t manage to put much weight on his wounded leg. Parker goes to his side.

“You left the crutch they gave you.”

It’s an observation, not an accusation or a question. Good thing, because that means he doesn’t have to give a reason for why a hunk of metal and rubber felt so offensively pointless in the moment. It was partially because adrenaline and the buzz of a hard-fought for win made him feel invincible despite the two bleeding holes in his skin proving otherwise. More than that though, it was because he didn’t want a crutch under his arm when he could have Parker and Hardison under his hands, whole and safe and _there_ despite the hell of the afternoon they had that did it’s best to take them out.

“I’m an idiot,” he manages to reply after biting back a pained groan as she helps him step down from the van.

“Nobody’s arguing,” Hardison chimes in as he goes to support his other side.

The staff in the lobby of the hotel look alarmed at the sight of the three of them, but no one moves to stop them as they make their way inside and down the hall towards the elevator. Eliot manages to keep himself upright long enough for them to get inside their room. Parker and Hardison begin to maneuver him towards the couch as soon as the door is closed and locked.

“Unless you wanna pay to get blood out of it later, I suggest puttin’ me in the bathroom.”

Hardison wrinkles his nose. “Sounds like a recipe for a nasty infection.”

“Hardison,” he groans, “you can order three course meals from room service here, this is the nicest bathroom I will have ever bled in. Now, we can continue to stand here and debate until I go into shock or you can let me sit down.”

That gets him moving. “Alright, alright.”

He hisses in pain as they carefully deposit him on the gray marble floor. Parker sits beside him while Hardison anxiously hovers in the doorway, fidgeting. Eliot considers feeling bad about the little drops of blood already dotting the floor and however much more will get on it before the day’s over, but then again, he did help save Lord knows how many people from dying of Spanish flu today, so maybe his conscience is clear on this one. They’ll clean up before they leave, anyway.

It’s not long until a knock sounds at the door. There are three quick raps. A pause. Then three more.

“It’s Paul,” Eliot tells Hardison, “let him in.”

Hardison wordlessly complies, and as soon as their room door opens, he hears a voice ask for him by full name.

“Bathroom, Paul,” he calls.

When the man walks into view, Eliot gives him a nod. “Long time, no see.”

“Indeed, and seems like you’ve upgraded since I last visited you,” Paul replies with a glance around the room.

Eliot looks down at himself. “Not by much.”

He puts his oversized black medical bag on the counter and then squats down to look him over. Eliot does the same. Paul’s always been a wiry guy, and his once black hair is turning gray in his middle age and is thinning at the top. Between that, his medical bag, and the fact that he’s wearing a leather jacket to a house call, it’s not entirely unfair that anyone would think the man was a back alley doctor.

It’s fine; he knows he’s good at what he does.

Paul stands and shrugs off the coat. “You don’t look nearly as bad as that last time either, so still an upgrade.” He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “I need the jittery one to go on a supply run,” he says, holding the paper in Hardison’s direction. “You’ll need a few things to get you through the next week or so.”

Hardison looks like he might get hung up on the use of “jittery” to describe him, but he takes the list anyway and then looks over to Parker on the floor. “You got him, babe?”

“I got him,” Parker replies with a nod.

“Hope you’re not attached to those clothes,” Paul says as he makes a makeshift IV drip by slinging a couple of blood transfusion bags over the shower curtain rod, “because I’m cutting you out of them.”

“I like the shirt.”

“Well, get your arm out of it, then,” he sighs.

Slowly, painfully, and with Parker’s help, he does. “Still got a bullet in my leg,” he tells him when he’s free.

Paul acknowledges that with a hum as he removes what he needs from his bag and then sits in front of him. “Are you staying?” he asks Parker as he cuts up Eliot’s jeans.

“Yes,” she says, moving a little closer.

“Well, if you’re comfortable with it, you might want to give him something to hold on to.”

Without hesitation, she holds her hand out on his lap in offering, palm up, and looks at him expectantly. Eliot rolls his eyes.

“Oh dear,” Paul sighs again as he gets to work.

Eliot winds up taking it anyway.

It’s not a quick process, or an easy one, and it hurts like hell, but he holds on to Parker’s hand and manages not to cry out. He can feel her thumb rubbing soothing circles against the top of his hand and focuses on that, as well as taking deep, shaky breaths whenever he can manage. At some point, her other hand winds up in his hair, and her voice is in his ear, calmly whispering words of encouragement.

“Almost over, Eliot.”

“It’s ok, Eliot.”

“Eliot, you’re doing so good.”

He hopes the shiver that travels up his spine and the goosebumps on his arm look like a pain response, and nothing more than that.

When he’s bullet free, stitched up, and sponged clean, he lets go of her hand, and she moves away to give him a couple inches of space. Hardison returns then with a bag of supplies, and they help him to the couch.

“I don’t recommend strenuous activity for the next week, but use your best judgement,” Paul instructs him as the other two clean up the bathroom. “Keep the stitches clean and bandaged, yada, yada, you know the drill, I’m sure. I gave your friend a script for pain medication, so take it as needed.”

He won’t, but it’s good to know it’s there. “Gotcha. Thanks, Paul.”

“Don’t mention it,” he replies as he goes to leave. “I would say keep in touch, but I’d rather you didn’t need to see me again. If at all possible.”

“Feelin’s mutual,” Eliot says as the door closes.

Worn out, he leans back and closes his eyes. He feels himself drifting, but rouses when Hardison and Parker join him in the main room.

“We should probably just take those towels and burn them, honestly,” Hardison says.

“No reason to scare housekeeping,” Eliot agrees.

“Right.” He gives Eliot a once over. “Anyway, you gonna be good now, man?”

“I’ll live.”

“’Kay, well, want to find a movie to watch?”

He shakes his head and shifts to sit at the edge of the couch, wincing slightly. “Think I just need to go to bed. Been a long day.”

“Yeah, yeah, for sure,” Hardison replies, moving to his side while Parker goes to the other.

Parker cocks her head at him. “Should you sleep with us?”

He stumbles. “What?”

“Sleep in our room. In case you need anything,” she says as she steadies him, innocently concerned. Of course she is.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he grumbles. “I’ll be fine.”

Their suite has two rooms, and they help him to his and into his bed without another word. As they leave him though, Hardison turns in the doorway, expression needlessly full of worry. “You’ll holler if you need something, right?”

Eliot groans. “Yes, Hardison, if I’m dyin’, I’ll letcha know.”

He hesitates in the doorway for a moment longer before he goes, leaving a crack in the door instead of shutting it completely.

Left alone, Eliot sighs, completely exhausted and in pain. He carefully pulls the covers up with his good arm and burrows further into the covers, grunting in pain when he shifts his leg the wrong way. When it’s clear he’s as comfortable as he’s going to get, he stills and closes his eyes.

But he doesn’t sleep.

Instead, he replays the day. In general, it was pretty shitty, but it had its moments, and those are what filter through his mind’s eye now. The weirdly impromptu diamond heist this morning, where he watched Hardison crack a safe in no time at all with a device he’d built himself and Parker flipped and backbended through security lasers with more grace than any trained gymnast he knew (he’d dated a few). Hardison’s face, so close to his own when he had to be talked off a ledge and his thigh under his hands while he held him still so as not to blow them all to bits. Parker in Hardison’s arms, dangling backwards to defuse a bomb. The both of them warm under his hands as they walked away. Parker whispering in his ear. 

He’s alone, so he doesn’t suppress the shiver that that particular memory sends down his spine like a tiny electric shock, and then replays them all again. He’ll choose to forget in the morning, but for now it’s all his, and he feels the familiar ache, a different kind than the one left by bullet holes but no less intense, along with something else that simmers under his skin, like an itch he can’t (and won’t) scratch.

Eliot wants. He wants Hardison and Parker both, and it’s not a mystery as to how he came to be in this position, either.

It started with a different kind of want, a need, really, to protect and to serve, to do some good for the world. That need led him to enlist in the army just as soon as he was able, and the skills he developed and honed led to other opportunities elsewhere, to groups far more covert that were involved in things twice as dangerous. But the danger didn’t bother him, he liked the work, and he was damn good at following the orders given to him, so he kept moving up.

It was a naïve mistake to think that following orders and doing good would always be the same thing. Most of the time, that wasn’t the case. But at some point, that ceased to matter to him anyway. He belonged to whoever was giving the orders, and he never considered objecting to anything no matter how much it would have hurt the bright-eyed kid he had once been.

Even when he was no longer in the pocket of the U.S. government, he always belonged to somebody. Usually, it was whoever was paying the most for whatever deed they needed accomplished. It was his choice then, and it was a series of choices that led to him to belonging to Damien Moreau and becoming the worst version of himself he’d ever been. Even then, he only left when he could no longer look at himself in the mirror.

For the past few years, he’s belonged to Nate and the Leverage team, though on some level it’s been a different sort of belonging. Slowly, begrudgingly, he’s become used to that, for better or worse, and though there is definitely still a spot waiting for him in hell, it’s been nice to do good for a change. The team is smaller now and contains just the three of them, but that’s fine. Poetic, really. He’s belonged to Hardison and Parker for a long time now.

He can’t pinpoint exactly when that happened. Like the both of them, it was a sneaky thing. At the start of it all, Hardison pissed him off because he never shut up and Parker freaked him out because, when she did speak, it was to say the most bizarre things he’d ever heard in his life. But he took hits for them anyway and led them out of danger, job after job, and along the way he began to see their skills as more than just cogs in the Leverage machine and found himself admiring them instead.

That was where the trouble began. It was a slippery slope from admiring them to caring about them as people and taking the hits out of concern for their wellbeing. Funny how fast he slid down that slope. He blames it on the fact that they’re insane and have no sense of self preservation. Parker likes to throw herself off of buildings and Hardison thinks that orange soda is a good substitute for water. Eliot had a duty to Nate and Sophie, but he burns with that old need to protect and serve every time he so much as thinks about either of the other two. And for a while, that drove him absolutely crazy. But he kept sliding until it didn’t, until taking care of them was something he wanted rather than an obligation he felt he had, until he found himself wanting to spend time with them outside of jobs, until he found himself genuinely liking them.

And then he slid well past that.

It was not an exaggeration when he promised Sophie he’d protect them until his dying day. He absolutely will. Even if the team disbands, if they all retire, or when Parker and Hardison kick him off the team when he inevitably gets too old to be their hitter, he’ll keep close enough tabs on them that nothing and no one will get to them anyway.

Because he belongs to them, and his life is the only thing he deserves to give them.

**Author's Note:**

> This whole thing got away from me a bit, so I'm splitting up into 2 parts. I hope to post the rest of it soon. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!


End file.
